Horst Biesold’s Crying Hands treats a neglected aspect of the Holocaust:
the fate of the deaf in Nazi Germany. His book covers a story that has remained
almost unknown. In the United States, even in Germany, few are aware that during
the Nazi era human beings–men, women, and children–with impaired hearing were
sterilized against their will, and even fewer know that many of the deaf were
also murdered.
--From the Foreword by Henry Friedlander

When the Nazis assumed power in Germany in 1933, they wasted no time in implementing
their radical policies, first by securing passage of the Law for the Prevention of
Offspring with Hereditary Diseases. Among those designated by this law as
“congenitally disabled” were deaf people. Horst Biesold’s newly translated book
examines this neglected aspect of Nazi “racial hygiene” through interviews with
more than 1,000 deaf survivors of this brutal law that authorized forced
sterilizations, abortions, and eventually murder.

Crying Hands meticulously delineates the antecedents of Nazi eugenics,
beginning with Social Darwinism (postulated in the mid-nineteenth century) and
tracing the various sterilization laws later initiated throughout the world,
including many passed and practiced in the United States. This exceptional
scholarship is movingly paralleled by the human faces fixed to the numbing
statistics, as in story after story those affected recount their irretrievable
loss, pain, and misplaced shame imposed upon them by the Nazi regime. Through
their stories, told to Biesold in German Sign Language, they have given voice
to the countless others who died from the specious science practiced by the
Third Reich. And now their own trails finally have been acknowledged.

Horst Biesold was a professor and teacher of deaf students in Bremen,
Germany.